Re: GEN: NEW SEARCH ENGINE

[Dan Robinson Indexing Services <drobinson@INFO.HWWILSON.COM>]

Jo, (and all),

You've run into one of the reasons that search engines produce
thousands of hits, many of which seem to have no relation to what
you are looking for.

Most web search engines automatically search by left, right, and root
truncation, unless you can specifically tell them not to. Some then
give you the order based on root hit percentages, rather than word
hits. To see a good example of how this affects a search, take a look
at the 'Refine search' option in Altavista.

So, in this search, Beanie   Babies, we could have:

be
bee
bean
bea
anie
annie  (since anie is an obvious misspelling, a sound alike list
might kick in)

bab
baby
babe
babs
abie
abe

Then, since some xxx sites load their meta tags with every word in a
dictionary, they will rise to the top of an unsophisticated search
engine.

Dan Robinson
Indexing Services
H.W. Wilson Company
Bronx, NY
drobinson@hwwilson.com

On  7 Aug 98 at 15:13, Josephine Dervan wrote:

> Dear Fellow LM_NET friends-
>
> I have a weird experience that I have to share with you. Earlier this
> week I was looking up sites for Beanie Babies. I went to the NET SEARCH
> heading on my Netscape Navigator screen and went to a new engine called
> GoTo.com. I put in "beanie babies" and it came up with many pages of 40
> links each. The listings were annotated and after several checks I found
> an interesting one at #77. It offered resonably priced BBs. So I clicked
> on it and up came an X-rated site with a racy domain name. I was sure I
> had made a mistake so I went back to the GoTo page and sure enough the
> URL listed at the bottom was this one. As far as I could tell there was
> nothing about BBs on the site although "babes" seemed to abound. Since
> it was only #77 in thousands of hits listed by confidence levels, it
> seemed out of place.
>
> I sent an e-mail today to the president of GoTo.com but I sure am glad
> that I was not at school with a child doing the search. I guess the
> moral of this story is to limit searched of kids subjects to something
> like Yahooligans or to install a filter.
>
> Jo
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Josephine Dervan
> Library Media Specialist and Internet Trainer
> Strathmore Elementary School
> Aberdeen, New Jersey, USA 07747
>
> Home-rderva@injersey.com
>
>

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